5 Technologies That Boost HR Meeting Productivity

Five types of technology to help you boost productivity and efficiency in your HR meetings

Microsoft Outlook first came bundled with Office in 1997. WebEx launched in 1999, and Skype came out in 2003. 20 years later, all three products remain key enablers for office meetings worldwide.

And for many, that’s all they get. Solid, decades-old web conferencing and a powerful calendar.

But wait… there’s more!

The explosion of technology over the past 15 years spawned hundreds of products designed to boost meeting productivity, often tackling problems that WebEx and Outlook don’t know exist.

If you’re interested in more productive HR meetings, here are five types of modern technology to check out.

1. Advanced Meeting Scheduling

With Outlook, you can compare open times on your calendar with your co-workers. Handy – but who has just one calendar these days?

This is where FreeBusy come in. FreeBusy pulls information from all your calendars, providing a consolidated view of available times.

Companies don’t usually make their Outlook availability public though, which creates problems when meeting with people outside the office – like, oh say, when you need to schedule interviews.

Products like ScheduleOnce simplify scheduling interviews and other appointments— a huge time saver for setting those one-on-one meetings— and products like Doodle help you set up polls for scheduling group meetings. Meetingbird and Calendly handle both individual appointments and group scheduling polls.

Finally, several companies are using AI in an attempt to eliminate the scheduling hassle altogether. ClaraLabs and X.ai are leaders in this space.

2. Video Conferencing and Smart Meeting Rooms

WebEx and Skype for Business both support video conferencing, and this works fine for lots of folks. Others ran into glitches sometime in the past and gave up.

That’s too bad because video conferencing has come a long way. Video absolutely increases virtual meeting engagement and productivity, and it’s critical for any sensitive discussions with remote employees. Zoom, in particular, is growing rapidly because the video quality and ease of use make it practical for everyday use.

You can run a video conference with everyone using the camera built into their laptop. You can also upgrade to a 3D-capable camera that will project your image on top of your slides to create more engaging training or beam the smiling face of the one lonely remote worker onto the screen of a robot doppelganger.

Yet another form of video conferencing broadcasts a room of people into the meeting. In today’s smart meeting rooms, cameras come attached to flat-panel displays and interactive whiteboards, displays outside the room show the day’s schedule, and you can connect your laptop and launch presentations wirelessly with a few clicks.

If you’re still monkeying around with cables and shouting into a spider phone at every meeting, you’re behind the times.

3. Collaborative Note Taking

Want to keep everyone focused on your meeting and off their phones? Use collaborative note-taking technology.

Microsoft’s OneNote and Google Docs, products included with the office suites you already use, make it possible for groups to type notes and see each other’s contributions in real-time.

When people create meeting notes together in real time, they can quickly see and fix any misunderstandings. More importantly, because they wrote down their agreements and action items together, they’re more likely to actually remember them and follow through.

Meeting management technologies, like MeetingKing, Lucid Meetings, and Meeting Booster, take this meeting productivity to another level by supporting collaboration on both the agenda and meeting notes, and by storing re-usable meeting templates that cut out the time and hassle involved in meeting administration.

After all, the true measure of a meeting’s productivity isn’t what happens during the meeting. It’s the positive changes that happen afterward as a result.

4. Brainstorming and Decision Support

Brainstorm a ton of ideas, group them, rate each one, and vote on priorities—these steps are common to dozens of group decision-making techniques proven to result in better decisions and buy-in. Most teams also reserve these techniques for special occasions festooned in sticky notes and stale cookies.

This is almost criminally irresponsible because the technology that makes it easy for anyone to quickly lead a high-quality decision-making meeting is readily available. To quote Bain & Company, “Ultimately, a company’s value is just the sum of the decisions it makes and executes.” Many of these critical decisions rest under the HR department’s umbrella.

MeetingSphere, Stormz, PowerNoodle, and GroupMap are just a few of the online products that come loaded with pre-defined decision making templates and automated reports that anyone can use. Given how important decisions are to our success, why wing it?

5. AI Transcription and Coaching

Finally, let’s talk about AI: artificial intelligence.

Someday we may have a full-grown AI meeting assistant. Today’s meeting AI is young, but it’s getting legs under it.

For example, products like DialPad’s VoiceAI and Voicera will listen in on your meeting then report back with a full-text description, audio recording, and selected highlights. HR specialists may find the reports showing a computer’s dispassionate assessment of the emotional tone expressed by each meeting participant especially revealing.

Gong.io focuses these highlights to create “conversational intelligence” – guidance that helps sales representatives increase their performance on sales calls. Cogito also listens in on meetings, but it doesn’t wait until afterward to report. Instead, Cogito delivers coaching tips for every service professional in real time, making it one of the most cost-effective coaches you’ll ever hire.

An Abundance of Technology to Boost Meeting Productivity (if you know where to look)

It’s up to us to make our meetings work. The good news is that technology exists today that makes this easier, more productive, and shockingly, pretty darn fun. Who knew meetings could be so cool?